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AWAR of INDIVIDUALS: Bloomsbury Attitudes to the Great

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AWAR of INDIVIDUALS: Bloomsbury Attitudes to the Great 2 Bloomsbury What were the anti-war feelings chiefly expressed outside ‘organised’ protest and not under political or religious banners – those attitudes which form the raison d’être for this study? As the Great War becomes more distant in time, certain actions and individuals become greyer and more obscure whilst others seem to become clearer and imbued with a dash of colour amid the sepia. One thinks particularly of the so-called Bloomsbury Group.1 Any overview of ‘alter- native’ attitudes to the war must consider the responses of Bloomsbury to the shadows of doubt and uncertainty thrown across page and canvas by the con- flict. Despite their notoriety, the reactions of the Bloomsbury individuals are important both in their own right and as a mirror to the similar reactions of obscurer individuals from differing circumstances and backgrounds. In the origins of Bloomsbury – well known as one of the foremost cultural groups of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods – is to be found the moral and aesthetic core for some of the most significant humanistic reactions to the war. The small circle of Cambridge undergraduates whose mutual appreciation of the thoughts and teachings of the academic and philosopher G.E. Moore led them to form lasting friendships, became the kernel of what would become labelled ‘the Bloomsbury Group’. It was, as one academic described, ‘a nucleus from which civilisation has spread outwards’.2 This rippling effect, though tem- porarily dammed by the keenly-felt constrictions of the war, would continue to flow outwards through the twentieth century, inspiring, as is well known, much analysis and interpretation along the way. The emotions of Bloomsbury mirrored to a large extent those of its mentors. For one of the ‘fathers’ of Bloomsbury, the older Cambridge academic and humanist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson,3 the coming of war was disastrous. For him, as Bloomsbury patroness Lady Ottoline Morrell noted in 1916, the war came, ‘like a battering ram, bruising him and knocking him permanently over … he felt the Nation’s calamities more poignantly and devastatingly than any private calamity of his own’.4 Dickinson had himself referred to the time (in August 1914) when the war ‘burst upon the world’ in his published essay ‘The Basis of a Permanent Peace’. Dickinson wrote that the effect of the war upon those who had not followed foreign affairs, and, by implication, were Jonathan Atkin - 9781526137210 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/25/2021 02:14:44PM via free access chap2.p65 17 03/07/02, 12:33 18 A war of individuals busy with their own lives, was one of incredulity followed by a feeling that it must never happen again. However, peaceful intentions then became ‘submerged’ beneath hopes of victory and fears of defeat. During the waging of the war, ‘the purpose of it is in danger of being forgotten’, he warned, pointing out that soldiers did not possess normal freedoms of choice; ‘Those at the front have not the opportunity to consider the conditions of such a peace’. Hence, he con- cluded, it was the business of those at home to do so.5 Dickinson had gone up to Cambridge in 1881 from Charterhouse and had come, via a ‘Shelleyan religion of humanity’, into the orbit of the academic and thinker J.E. McTaggart and his philosophy of loving personal relationships linked to an absolute theoretical truth. Dickinson, though an atheist, had come from a background of Christian Socialism and, in common with much of the resultant Bloomsbury attitude toward the Great War, ‘the dissent which they articulated shared certain Christian and Socialist presuppositions, but neither Christianity nor Socialism was the substance of their pacifism’.6 From an early age, ‘his desire to serve humanity was strong’, E.M. Forster declared in his 1934 biogra- phy of Dickinson, though pointing out, in a statement tinged with Forster’s own post-war regret, that ‘love of humanity’ did not now (in the 1930s) carry with it the same promise that it had done in the previous century. In 1887, three years after obtaining a First in Classics, Dickinson was elected to a Fellowship at King’s College, his official subject being Political Science in which he lectured from 1896 to 1920. With the dawn of a new century the concerns of the wider world now occu- pied more of Dickinson’s time: for example, his involvement in the founding of the journal Independent Review in 1903 to help combat a policy of aggressive imperialism. As Forster put it, Dickinson’s philosophy was that, ‘We must first get the house straight then fill it with beautiful things … though he [Dickinson] was sensible enough to know that unless we have a certain amount of beautiful things lying about we shall not think it worth while to get the house straight’.7 Dickinson never lost his appreciation of beauty, especially that of the country- side of England. As he wrote in his 1901 volume Letters from John Chinaman and other Essays, ‘To feel, and in order to feel to express, or at least to under- stand the expression of all that is lovely in Nature, of all that is poignant and sensitive in man is to us in itself a sufficient end’.8 Dickinson’s The Meaning of Good of 1901 (some of which was written whilst staying with artist and Bloomsbury ‘member’ Roger Fry) had been largely inspired by the ethics of Dickinson’s rejected Christian background and the philosophy of McTaggart, though Dickinson was ultimately more affected by G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica, which appeared in 1903. Dickinson was fifty-two in 1914 and following the outbreak of war he, like Bertrand Russell (see Chapter 3), wrote numerous articles on the war. He and Russell both joined the Union of Democratic Control and the No Conscription Fellowship, with Dickinson becoming President of the Cambridge branch of Jonathan Atkin - 9781526137210 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/25/2021 02:14:44PM via free access chap2.p65 18 03/07/02, 12:33 Bloomsbury 19 the UDC. In his writings, Dickinson apportioned blame to no single country for the conflict; rather, he argued, it was the fault of the secret diplomacy of the international diplomatic system, a system which, according to Dickinson, had to be altered by the implementation of some form of general alliance in order to prevent future conflicts from escalating. He became a leading figure in the League of Nations Society and grew, like Russell, impatient with the UDC which did not accept the wider concept of a league as an integral part of its policy. Both Dickinson and Russell, according to the academic M.R. Pollock, shared the ‘uncompromising individualism’ of the conscientious objectors (whom they both supported in the Liberal press) and were engaged upon a crusade for moral principles, their ideals being those of the Cambridge Apostles: beauty, friend- ship, love, reason, individualism and private conscience. ‘Passion is needed’, wrote Dickinson in the Nation, ‘for the real things, for good instead of evil, for truth instead of lies, for love instead of hate. To turn it into those channels, the friends of reason are always working’.9 This focus on the channelling of human energies had much in common with the ideas of Bertrand Russell. Dickinson’s pacifism, like that of Russell’s, ‘was couched primarily in rational and ethical terms rather than in political or economic terms’,10 as Forster later pointed out. Though Dickinson perhaps placed too much faith in human rationality and tended, unlike Russell, to ignore the ‘primitive and pre-logical’ element that survived in ‘civilised’ modern man, both men agreed that the role of the pacifist was ‘to create life’ and that war was the enemy of ‘the passion of love, the perception of beauty, the contemplation of truth’. During war, man’s sensibili- ties were affected by a ‘blind intoxication’, and he became divorced from a peacetime existence of ‘impassioned reason’.11 Pacifists supported the concept of ‘a free friendship where men co-operate or compete as independent individu- als not as passive creatures of a man movement … to be swept away on a torrent of corporate passion is to them not an ideal at all. On the contrary, it is the negation of all they value’.12 Just as Russell’s later dismissal from Trinity College (see Chapter 3) seemed to ‘snap one’s last link with Cambridge’, as Dickinson put it in a letter to his fellow academic, the war’s effect had brought to Dickinson’s Cambridge exist- ence what he later described as a ‘sense of alienation from common opinion’ due to his own attitude and those of others towards him, in particular the patriotic McTaggart. Most of his former pupils were serving at the front, and his classes were now full of women. E.M. Forster proclaimed that Dickinson’s ‘greatest disillusionment’ was with the attitudes of the leading academic insti- tutions; ‘those who should have been the leaders followed the crowd down a steep place’ and the students, whom he expected to ‘keep the light of truth burning in a storm’, Dickinson found to be ‘blindly patriotic’, false or plain fearful when confronted with the tide of public opinion. ‘All discussion, all pursuit of truth ceased in a moment’, Dickinson later recalled, ‘To win the war or to hide safely among the winners became the only preoccupation. Abroad Jonathan Atkin - 9781526137210 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/25/2021 02:14:44PM via free access chap2.p65 19 03/07/02, 12:33 20 A war of individuals was heard only the sound of guns, at home only the ceaseless patter of a propa- ganda utterly indifferent to truth.’13 The war affected Dickinson profoundly; he often referred to a ‘gulf’ between his remembered pre-war life and existence against the backdrop of war.
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